Ohio food banks will suffer from prison farm shutdown, advocates say

Saturday

Apr 16, 2016 at 12:01 AMApr 17, 2016 at 10:43 AM

The news that Ohio's 10 prison farms will be shut down and sold floored Lisa Hamler-Fugitt. The longtime executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks didn't know about the closings until she read about them last week in The Dispatch.

Alan Johnson, The Columbus Dispatch

The news that Ohio’s 10 prison farms will be shut down and sold floored Lisa Hamler-Fugitt.

The longtime executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks didn’t know about the closings until she read about them last week in The Dispatch.

That’s how much fresh food and cash the food banks association harvested over eight years through a public-private partnership with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

“It means we’re going to have to redouble our efforts to raise more food and more money,” she said of the closings.

The association buys seed, fertilizer, fuel, some equipment and product packaging for the prisons. In exchange, it gets cabbages, cantaloupes, cucumber, sweet corn, eggplant and other vegetables, plus cash from field crops such as winter wheat and soybeans. She said it’s a win-win-win arrangement, helping hungry families, fueling the Ohio Penal Industries farm program, and keeping inmates busy doing community service.

Hamler-Fugitt said the produce and cash are crucial to the agency that supplies 12 regional food banks across the state. In fiscal year 2015, the association and its provider network served 197 million pounds of food to 9.6 million Ohioans, one-third of them children younger than 18.

“Not one dime of taxpayer money goes into this,” she said. “Anytime you’re able to produce your own food, it’s going to be cheaper.”

Ohio prisons chief Gary Mohr announced last week that after more than 100 years, the state is getting out of the prison farming business. He said the department will phase out farming at 10 prisons across the state, covering about 12,500 acres, 2,300 beef cattle and 1,000 dairy cattle, by the end of the year.

Officials said the move isn’t dictated by finances, but to focus on the core mission of inmate rehabilitation, as well as to cut down the flow of drugs, tobacco and other contraband coming in through isolated prison farms.

The closings are expected to affect less than 70 staff members and 220 inmates during the peak season. The employees will move to different jobs inside the prisons, and the inmates will be transferred to other job assignments. No layoffs are planned.

Hamler-Fugitt said that when she called the agency, she was told the state would continue and perhaps expand the partnership with the food banks. There was no explanation how that will work with the farms closing. She has a meeting with prison officials on Monday.

Mohr said that having inmates work on farms to provide food for the prison population is outmoded today. Few inmates prepare for jobs working on farms when they are released from prison. In addition, farms have become security risks with people dropping off drugs, tobacco and other contraband to be picked up by inmates and smuggled back into prison.

The farm sites targeted for closing are:

•Allen Correctional Institution, Allen County (505 acres)

•Chillicothe Correctional, Ross County (1,809 acres)

•Grafton Correctional, Lorain County (1,130 acres)

•Lebanon Correctional, Warren County (1,746 acres)

•London Correctional, Madison County (2,800 acres)

•Marion Correctional, Marion County (995 acres)

•Mansfield Correctional, Richland County (1,485 acres)

•Pickaway Correctional, Pickaway County (1,200 acres)

•Southeastern Correctional Complex, Fairfield County (578 acres)

•Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, Scioto County (640 acres)

The Ohio Civil Services Employees Association, the union representing 30,000 state workers including prison employees, continues to question the closings. They said the sudden announcement amounted to an "end run around our contract," because the union wasn't told in advance about the move.